boring, we can't make a movie out of a "standard search pattern".
That's how flying is... Hours and hours of boredom that ends in a few seconds of shear terror. It never makes a good movie...
I guess they might be able to gin up enough oomph to make a TV show out of the search, but only if they can get a good narrator and some really good script writers. The only problem is that unless they find something, who's going to watch a show named "Earhart is still missing!"
This is not about being good or bad at navigating... They where fine at that task, they got pretty close if you believe the radio operator's logs. The logistics and coordination of the radio equipment was horrible and that played more of a role in the accident than their navigation skills. Earhart could transmit voice on aircraft frequencies and receive elsewhere, but the ship assigned to assist her could not transmit voice, only Morse code where she was listening. Earhart had documented difficulties with the direction finding radio equipment on her aircraft and didn't likely know Morse code.
They where looking for a tiny (barely large enough to land on) island in a vast ocean with no way to contact their ground support crew. Weather reports indicate broken to scattered cloud cover which would make it pretty difficult to spot small islands in the broken shadows. Heck, it would be hard to do with a fully functional GPS with broken clouds at 1,000 feet today...
Wasn't she a spy? Whatever happened to that theory? At least its more mature than the stupid typical slash idiot sexist jokes.
You mean that she was just using this flight as a cover story, and really intended to snoop on the Japanese who where invading China in 1937? Seems pretty far fetched.. I don't know how somebody as well known as Earhart was going to engage in spying activity during a well known publicity stunt where she was going to be the first woman to fly around the world. I suppose that being in Lae puts her close to Japan's military build up in P.N.G., but the invasion of P.N.G doesn't start until 1942...
No it's more likely she just got a bit lost, ran out of luck and gas just before she became fish food....
A little skepticism kicks in for me, is this an attempt to raise donations for an otherwise non-funded archaeological expedition ?
Given the letters from little girls with $2 donation being displayed in their "most important sponsors page".
I am not making the expedition wrong....
You are correct, this is an attempt to raise money... However I think they are wrong about the location by about 350 miles.
Earhart and her copilot would have to be really bad at navigation to end up 350 miles away from their destination. A sextant, compass and a watch are going to get you to within 10% of 350 miles, even for a beginner. I would not consider Earhart a beginner and her copilot was a professional airline pilot who did this for a living.
If they really found her remains, she and her copilot were incompetent fools that did a number of very stupid things... Earhart was neither incompetent or foolish and not prone to stupid mistakes. She may not have been the best pilot of her age, but her achievements up to this point prove she had above average skills and experience. I find it very hard to believe that this could be where she ended up.
The group doing this search are (in my opinion) looking in the wrong place. This island is about 350 miles away from Earhart's intended destination, Howard Island, and not on the "line of position" she would have been flying. In order to be anywhere near this island, Earhart and her copilot would have to be really horrible navigators and/or not following the standard navigation procedures of the day. I don't think either of them would have been this bad, even with the tools available at the time. Her copilot was a professional, who had a lot of experience doing this kind of navigation and I'm sure Earhart had some proficiency with the techniques.
Further, there is no way to know that the items found belonged to Earhart. There is no DNA to test in the bones and the cosmetic items where in common use. Nobody documented what personal items Earhart might have with her so there is no real reason to expect that this has to be where she ended up or that this is her stuff.
Another reason to doubt that this is Earhart is that it is unlikely anybody could survive a landing that puts the aircraft on the reef. Ditching aircraft of the day is going to kill you (by blunt impact or drowning) 99 times out of a 100. Making a difficult landing on a narrow beach and ending up on a reef in the process is even less likely.
Finally, there is some interesting evidence based on some measurements of the aircraft and radio configuration and various trained radio operators who logged hearing Earhart during the last few hours. This evidence puts Earhart fairly close to Howard Island before she ran out of gas. This evidence also shows that Earhart was navigating fairly well and following standard procedures in her attempt to find Howard Island. All this evidence supports the conclusion that Earhart was following standard procedures and was close to Howard Island and NOT 350 miles away.
What happened is simple. The radios on her plane didn't work either being broke or not properly tuned. Adjusting the tube radios of the day is a technically difficult task that's easy to get wrong and Earhart didn't have a lot of experience using them because they where not common equipment on aircraft of the day. With the radios not working Earhart couldn't hear the folks who could hear her and where trying to help her Earhart got close to her destination a few times and was flying a standard search pattern in somewhat unfavorable conditions and simply ran out of luck and gas. In my opinion she is within about 30 min of flight time of Howard Island on her reported line of position (give or take 10 miles or so) which is a huge search area of mostly water. If she didn't die on impact with the water, she would have drowned as the aircraft sank only moments after it came to rest on the surface.
Where it is nice to think Earhart survived as a castaway, it is nearly impossible for this location to be where she ended up.
This is about money, and not privacy. The major ISP's are starting to fight (and win) subpenas trying to identify their clients, not because they care about privacy, but because it is cheaper in the long run. The ISP in this case is also trying to lower their costs with their 2 week record retention policy. There are three ways this reduces their costs.
1. Their logs are gone in 2 weeks so those who would attempt legal action will have an impossible time window of 2 weeks to file a case and get the court to agree to their subpenas.. The ISP simply replies checks the time frames specified in the subpena and if ti is more than two weeks ago they reply with a form letter that says "Our records retention policy requires that we delete all logs over 2 weeks old" so we are unable to provide the information requested. Case closed with a form letter, lawyer paid almost nothing. Eventually the folks filing these cases will get the message and stop trying and then you can fire the lawyer...
2. The labor required to service subpenas will be reduced, both in the technical and legal departments so they can reduce labor costs and save some money.
3. There will be a slight reduction in disk space required (albeit pretty limited) to store logs. This is not a huge issue for a small ISP, but it might lower their hardware and maintenance costs.
This ISP is not trying to protect anybodies privacy, and they admit that fact. They will gladly take advantage of PR generated by folks who would see this as a privacy issue in order to get more customers, but this is not about privacy it's about saving money.
How on earth?? Oh.. It's not on the earth, we have ice out in space, on an otherwise solid rock. I'm not understanding first how and when this water actually made it to this location.
How about it being carried there by the same comet fragment that made the crater in the first place?
Ok.. That's *how* but not *when*. See the problem here is time. If it's been a few million years since the water arrived, there is no way there is any left because ice vaporizes in space.. If there is surface water on the moon, you have to either make the moon pretty young (like a few thousand years) or you have to come up with a way for the water to show up within that time.
How on earth?? Oh.. It's not on the earth, we have ice out in space, on an otherwise solid rock. I'm not understanding first how and when this water actually made it to this location. I see a serious problem here. Ice in space, even at very low temperatures, tends to turn to vapor and disappear. It may happen at very low rates when you are in the shade on the moon, but it will turn to vapor. If you stipulate that the moon is a few billion years old and the surface is largely unchanged for the last few million years, any surface ice would surely have vaporized by now.
For this reason, I'm a bit surprised to hear they think this is water. I suppose it is *possible* that some comet dropped off some of it's water in the recent past, but the moon presents a pretty small cross section to capture chunks of comments, and usually such impacts are fairly high energy affairs so even a large chunk of ice is going to leave very little.
I suppose they will have to come up with some theory to explain this, because we *all* know how old things need to be... Forget the guys that are saying 6 thousand years.... We got to have billions or this doesn't work.
Or did you mean that national governments should handle it?
I was leaving the choice of who or what managed the local DNS registry up to the local government of the country. Of course the country would be free to manage their domains however they wish, do it themselves or have a private company do it.
Also, for the rest of your critique, I fully realize that #1 would break a lot of stuff, but the question was "How would have you done it differently?" not "What would you change now?" We are truly stuck with the legacy and URL's are not going to change anytime soon.
1. Change the URL spec to something like "Protocol:(port)//Top.domain.subdomain....) so "http://shashdot.org" would be "http://org.slashdot" or if you used a nonstandard port it would be "http:8080//org.slashdot" and if you owned org.slashdot you would be free to make as many sub domains as would fit in a URL.
2. Make URL's Unicode strings so they are usable across as many languages as possible.
3. Fix the DNS protocol to include some way to validate that the information you get actually comes from the registered owner of the domain in question. Also provide a means to flush the domain table cache before the TTL expires, by making servers that cache register with the source.
4. Assign standard TLD's (say for each country) to local authorities. Additional top level domains (say "slashdot") are allowed as well, but in order to be available as a domain the local authority must allow it (and can possibly require local payment for local access.)
There really are some necessary regulations that need to be enforced. First, they need to make sure they prevent junking up low earth orbits by making sure there are a minimum number of bits coming off anything that might end up in orbit, something NASA has the most experience with. Second, they need to make sure launch and recovery operations are properly coordinated with air traffic, which is of concern to the FAA.
I'm sure there are a whole pile of issues that would be best to get into the FAA's regulations before private space flight becomes commonplace. The above are just a few.
Imagine a government with access to a complex OS source code.
Hmmmm.... I close my eyes and imagine that.... Um.. Not much help to me without the necessary tools to build said source into something and perhaps some documentation that explains how stuff is supposed to work... Oh, Well I suppose you could eventually figure out what tools you needed though trial and error, then developed your own documentation on the internal workings of Microsoft's code.. But make no mistake, it's NOT going to be an easy task to work through enough of this to even attempt to use the knowledge for anything useful.
Besides, it would be MUCH easier and cheaper to co-opt some hardware vendor's driver set and slip your stuff into that than risk doing the same at Microsoft.. Not that I'm saying it didn't happen, only that it seems easier other ways.....
But that is how conspiracies work. The more information you don't have the stronger the evidence that it must be real.
I mean a while back they took a mixed race baby born in a different country, paid the hospital to lie to publish a new paper reports, and an other insider generated false documents to prove he was born in the United States, Pay for a team of actors to say they knew this child when they were children, all in the offshoot that perhaps this child (where the culture at the time figured had near 0 chance of major success in life) would become president and support the Socialist Cause....
Yea, and the moon landings where faked too.... Seriously, there are just some things that do not make sense to keep beating and this whole birther thing is a long dead horse, as is the idea that the moon landings were faked or 9/11 was an inside job. Besides, there are more effective arguments you can use to use that don't involve wild conspiracies where you have to suspend all reason.
It's usually better to not think of things as conspiracies anyway. Folks are usually not that good at cooking up such complicated hoaxes and are even worse at pulling them off. This is especially true of hoaxes that would require the cooperation of large numbers of folks over long periods of time.
First and foremost is that there has to be TWO conductors unless we are dealing with static voltages. You can use one wire and the ground as the second conductor, but there is going to be significant resistance in any kind of useable length. This means that there are at least two places for someone to be making measurements to figure out the necessary information.
Second, this method has a limited number of logical states (LL, LH, HL, HH) that encode two bits of data which will be clearly observable on the wire. Of the four states you will see three unique wire states (Low, med, high) with only one not disclosing the state of both ends. Once you established these states by observing the wire, you can easily determine two of the four states. Thus by simple voltage measurements you have already decoded half of the information you need. What's left is to simply observe the direction of the current and that will tell you what end of the wire has low or high resistance.
I don't think thermal noise really matters here because for this to be a practical system you will have to pick voltage sources that have enough signal to noise so you can detect them at the both ends of the wire. They may look like random noise, and even be random noise, but in order for there to be a delectable result at either end of the wire means there is a measurable value. Further, in order to detect highs and lows, each end of the system will have to KNOW what voltage is being applied, or how could they know the voltage/current to look for?
I suppose you could improve your security by increasing the number of resisters, but if this worked for two, it is sure to work for more than two values, just with more emphasis on the current measurements being required.
This all sounds great, but it is not really what happens. I've seen some pretty interesting issues raised by folks who are definitely creationists which are summarily dismissed as hogwash because their different world view. Further, the reasoned objections raised by creationists are often not even acknowledged as being anything more than religious based tripe of the lowest order. Canned responses like "Creationism is not based in fact" are often thrown out unfairly.
As I see it, the issue really boils down to your basic world view. If you equate "scientific method" with no creator (i.e. The theory of a creator cannot be proven so therefore must be invalid) then you simply *have* to be dismissive of creationists, because your world view demands it. You get statements like "Creationism is not fact based" because of the basic world view of the speaker, not because the Creationists argument isn't scientific or based on accepted scientific laws and observable facts.
Problem here is that science would have to admit that proving or disproving the existence of a creator is out of its ability, yet in many cases they are driven to assume that a creator does not exist because "it's not scientific to believe that God exists". So, if a creator exists (an open question by most accounts) and science doesn't allow for that possibility there is a good chance that science is wrong in this case.
I consider it a logical folly to simply dismiss the scientific views of others who really just differ in world view. I get it, that if you want to assume there is no creator, Evolution is pretty much the only game in town, but if you allow for a creator to exist in your world view, many more possible ways to explain things arise. Now if you don't want to accept the premise that a creator exists, or at least leave that question open in your world view, how's the results of that different than a religious zealot who refuses to accept that the earth is NOT in the center of the universe? God doesn't exist, so evolution must be true.... Pretty sad
When I lost a job to a layoff a few years ago, I left them with a list of accounts and passwords that they needed to change to make sure I had no access to their systems anymore. I had firewall passwords, root passwords on a number of business critical and other accesses that could have been used to shut them down. I assumed that they actually had disabled or changed all my accounts, at least until about 18 months later when I got a phone call...
"Hey, do you have that admin password for the firewall still?"
"You are kidding me right? I left all this information with you when I left 18 months ago and you are only *now* getting around to this? I don't have this information anymore because I left it with YOU." (Even if I did there was no way I would tell them...) "But I can help you recover the password if you want to hire me. Let's see, $100/hour plus expenses, minimum 5 hours paid in advance...." They never called again after that.
Seriously it is really bad to even think you can just walk of with proprietary information or do damage to some business because they let you go. I would consider it STUPID to even consider doing something like that. It's very likely that they will be able to figure out what happened and who was responsible, then turn you in to the police or just sue you directly. Either way is bad enough...
We are directly responsible for this planet entering a new geological age with as much speed and force as the Cretaceousâ"Paleogene extinction event.
I'm struck with the contradiction in what you posted. Why is still an open question yet you assume "We are directly responsible?"
For the sake of argument, I'll stipulate that Global warming is happening. However, we do NOT know, for sure, that man is the cause of it, or that we can do anything about it. It may be time to start planning for a warmer earth, but unless we KNOW that specific human activity is actually causing the issue we need to carefully consider all the impacts on what we do. Incomplete understanding of this will only lead to bad policy, and bad policy will only lead to more pain and suffering.
For example. There is a push to "reduce fossil fuel use" and use renewables here in the USA. The EPA has started mandating the use of Ethanol as motor fuel because it is a renewable resource. Sounds great right? Not so fast... Two things are now happening... First, grain and corn that was once used for food is now being used to make Ethanol instead. Prices for Corn have increased as demand rises and we turn food into fuel. Problem is, this makes it harder for poorer folks who depend on cheap corn to live and drives up the cost of eggs, chicken, pork, beef and all things based on Corn (and other grains) as feed. Further, it tends to raise the production of corn crops, at the expense of other food crops so almost ALL foods now get more expensive. What did we do to the poor when we started mandating we turn food into fuel? We actually made them more hungry... Not a good thing. Also, Ethanol is STILL more expensive than the standard fuel, so because it is mandated fuel prices went up too. Just what we needed, higher food and fuel prices....
What we really cannot afford is BAD policy which is based on half of the truth or misunderstanding what is really going on. I agree that the stakes are high in this debate but we MUST be correct or we will do more damage than if we just left it alone. At this point we simply do not understand why this is happening, nor can one say with assurance that human activity has caused it so it is not wise to start making sweeping policy changes in an attempt to deal with the problem.
Finally. This is the only way that the RIAA/MPAA will change its ways: when other massive corporations start to fight back in court. Triple bonus to Comcast for calling this what it is: a shakedown organized through the legal system. I normally hate Comcast with a passion, but I will cheer them on in this fight. Bring out the popcorn!
Make no mistake, their motive is profit and nothing more. Now that there is legal grounds that allows you to say "no" every ISP will be doing the same thing because it will eventually make this whole legal shakedown route impassable. Fairly quickly the shakedown artists will either figure out this doesn't work anymore and stop, or they will go broke trying. Once the message gets out that it doesn't pay, folks will stop doing it and the ISP's won't have to deal with it anymore and they can stop paying lawyers and admins to handle such requests.
First, and foremost Comcast is in business to make a profit. Make no mistake, if they thought they could profit from turning folks in, they would. Read some of the supporting documents. Verizon (a Comcast competitor) has taken a stand and started saying "Nope" to the courts/. Apparently they have enough legal ground to quash the "track this IP for us" requests. This is a two fold benefit to any ISP. First, you don't have to waste time and money having your staff searching though logs to find out who had that IP at that time. Second, you keep a small segment of your customers who care about such things from running to your competition.
Surely this problem will go away for all ISP's in fairly short order. Once an ISP starts successfully protesting such requests for information, the guys doing the shakedowns will eventually stop wasting time/money making the requests. ISP's will have to pay their lawyers a bit more up front to stop such requests, but eventually this will get them OUT of the business of turning in their subscribers by keeping them out of court. With the profits fading away, the shakedown artists will have abandon the courts and try to come up with some other way to do their shakedowns.
This is NOT over. Verizon, Comcast and others have signed on to start giving their customers warnings on behalf of various copyright holders for various types of infringing content passing over their networks. It's called something like "six strikes" and the providers are hoping it will allow them to generate more business for their "legal" services, by working in cooperation with MPAA and others. I hold now illusions that this "solution" is a good thing for anybody, except perhaps for the ISP's who see it as a marketing opportunity. I wonder if my bittorrent activity (all legal by the way) will draw a warning from Verizon (my ISP). I know they don't like bittorrent and it sure seems that they throttle my connection when I have active transfers, so I'm half expecting to be "warned" about the Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS distributions I try to seed over my 25Mbit connection.
They are in this for the profit. If they got a percentage of the shakedown take, you'd bet they be out there actively turning folks in before they got asked. They are simply making a business decision that it will cost less and maximize profits to take this route, and given that there seems to be legal justification now for saying "Nope!" that the court is accepting you can bet this will continue. If alternate legal tactics alter the economics for the ISP's, you can bet they will be turning folks in once more. If it proves profitable to start the "warning" process with their customers, even before a copyright holder complains, you can be the will do that too.
Oh yea.... Once I lived near a guy who had nearly the same name and he had some credit issues and bill collections. Apparently, our credit records got linked and it took ages to get the mess cleaned up....
You missed my point... Most of the data loss and service disruptions I've experienced or had to recover from were caused by human error, not hardware failures. Being on the cloud doesn't make this kind of problem go away, but it does make it a bit harder to recover because you have to call somebody...
Domestic monitoring *requires* a warrant so a judge must be shown probable cause or any evidence collected would not be allowed in court. So, in the case you are bringing up, if they monitor a domestic to domestic phone call without a warrant they cannot use any evidence collected to prosecute. Given this, they would be *stupid* to not get the warrants, because they'd walk Scott free otherwise.
Congress holds the money and can choose to not fund the CIA anytime it decides to. Just remember that the CIA is a part of the *executive* branch, subject to the funding appropriation process, the Laws passed by congress and upheld by the courts. There are checks and balances here and the CIA amounts to but a small player on this stage. So I encourage the senators to do what they can to make the point if they don't get what they want from the CIA.
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boring, we can't make a movie out of a "standard search pattern".
That's how flying is... Hours and hours of boredom that ends in a few seconds of shear terror. It never makes a good movie...
I guess they might be able to gin up enough oomph to make a TV show out of the search, but only if they can get a good narrator and some really good script writers. The only problem is that unless they find something, who's going to watch a show named "Earhart is still missing!"
This is not about being good or bad at navigating... They where fine at that task, they got pretty close if you believe the radio operator's logs. The logistics and coordination of the radio equipment was horrible and that played more of a role in the accident than their navigation skills. Earhart could transmit voice on aircraft frequencies and receive elsewhere, but the ship assigned to assist her could not transmit voice, only Morse code where she was listening. Earhart had documented difficulties with the direction finding radio equipment on her aircraft and didn't likely know Morse code.
They where looking for a tiny (barely large enough to land on) island in a vast ocean with no way to contact their ground support crew. Weather reports indicate broken to scattered cloud cover which would make it pretty difficult to spot small islands in the broken shadows. Heck, it would be hard to do with a fully functional GPS with broken clouds at 1,000 feet today...
One correction to my previous post... It's Howland Island.. NOT Howard Island.... Sorry...
Wasn't she a spy? Whatever happened to that theory? At least its more mature than the stupid typical slash idiot sexist jokes.
You mean that she was just using this flight as a cover story, and really intended to snoop on the Japanese who where invading China in 1937? Seems pretty far fetched.. I don't know how somebody as well known as Earhart was going to engage in spying activity during a well known publicity stunt where she was going to be the first woman to fly around the world. I suppose that being in Lae puts her close to Japan's military build up in P.N.G., but the invasion of P.N.G doesn't start until 1942...
No it's more likely she just got a bit lost, ran out of luck and gas just before she became fish food....
A little skepticism kicks in for me, is this an attempt to raise donations for an otherwise non-funded archaeological expedition ? Given the letters from little girls with $2 donation being displayed in their "most important sponsors page". I am not making the expedition wrong....
You are correct, this is an attempt to raise money... However I think they are wrong about the location by about 350 miles.
Earhart and her copilot would have to be really bad at navigation to end up 350 miles away from their destination. A sextant, compass and a watch are going to get you to within 10% of 350 miles, even for a beginner. I would not consider Earhart a beginner and her copilot was a professional airline pilot who did this for a living.
If they really found her remains, she and her copilot were incompetent fools that did a number of very stupid things... Earhart was neither incompetent or foolish and not prone to stupid mistakes. She may not have been the best pilot of her age, but her achievements up to this point prove she had above average skills and experience. I find it very hard to believe that this could be where she ended up.
The group doing this search are (in my opinion) looking in the wrong place. This island is about 350 miles away from Earhart's intended destination, Howard Island, and not on the "line of position" she would have been flying. In order to be anywhere near this island, Earhart and her copilot would have to be really horrible navigators and/or not following the standard navigation procedures of the day. I don't think either of them would have been this bad, even with the tools available at the time. Her copilot was a professional, who had a lot of experience doing this kind of navigation and I'm sure Earhart had some proficiency with the techniques.
Further, there is no way to know that the items found belonged to Earhart. There is no DNA to test in the bones and the cosmetic items where in common use. Nobody documented what personal items Earhart might have with her so there is no real reason to expect that this has to be where she ended up or that this is her stuff.
Another reason to doubt that this is Earhart is that it is unlikely anybody could survive a landing that puts the aircraft on the reef. Ditching aircraft of the day is going to kill you (by blunt impact or drowning) 99 times out of a 100. Making a difficult landing on a narrow beach and ending up on a reef in the process is even less likely.
Finally, there is some interesting evidence based on some measurements of the aircraft and radio configuration and various trained radio operators who logged hearing Earhart during the last few hours. This evidence puts Earhart fairly close to Howard Island before she ran out of gas. This evidence also shows that Earhart was navigating fairly well and following standard procedures in her attempt to find Howard Island. All this evidence supports the conclusion that Earhart was following standard procedures and was close to Howard Island and NOT 350 miles away.
What happened is simple. The radios on her plane didn't work either being broke or not properly tuned. Adjusting the tube radios of the day is a technically difficult task that's easy to get wrong and Earhart didn't have a lot of experience using them because they where not common equipment on aircraft of the day. With the radios not working Earhart couldn't hear the folks who could hear her and where trying to help her Earhart got close to her destination a few times and was flying a standard search pattern in somewhat unfavorable conditions and simply ran out of luck and gas. In my opinion she is within about 30 min of flight time of Howard Island on her reported line of position (give or take 10 miles or so) which is a huge search area of mostly water. If she didn't die on impact with the water, she would have drowned as the aircraft sank only moments after it came to rest on the surface.
Where it is nice to think Earhart survived as a castaway, it is nearly impossible for this location to be where she ended up.
This is about money, and not privacy. The major ISP's are starting to fight (and win) subpenas trying to identify their clients, not because they care about privacy, but because it is cheaper in the long run. The ISP in this case is also trying to lower their costs with their 2 week record retention policy. There are three ways this reduces their costs.
1. Their logs are gone in 2 weeks so those who would attempt legal action will have an impossible time window of 2 weeks to file a case and get the court to agree to their subpenas.. The ISP simply replies checks the time frames specified in the subpena and if ti is more than two weeks ago they reply with a form letter that says "Our records retention policy requires that we delete all logs over 2 weeks old" so we are unable to provide the information requested. Case closed with a form letter, lawyer paid almost nothing. Eventually the folks filing these cases will get the message and stop trying and then you can fire the lawyer...
2. The labor required to service subpenas will be reduced, both in the technical and legal departments so they can reduce labor costs and save some money.
3. There will be a slight reduction in disk space required (albeit pretty limited) to store logs. This is not a huge issue for a small ISP, but it might lower their hardware and maintenance costs.
This ISP is not trying to protect anybodies privacy, and they admit that fact. They will gladly take advantage of PR generated by folks who would see this as a privacy issue in order to get more customers, but this is not about privacy it's about saving money.
How on earth?? Oh.. It's not on the earth, we have ice out in space, on an otherwise solid rock. I'm not understanding first how and when this water actually made it to this location.
How about it being carried there by the same comet fragment that made the crater in the first place?
Ok.. That's *how* but not *when*. See the problem here is time. If it's been a few million years since the water arrived, there is no way there is any left because ice vaporizes in space.. If there is surface water on the moon, you have to either make the moon pretty young (like a few thousand years) or you have to come up with a way for the water to show up within that time.
How on earth?? Oh.. It's not on the earth, we have ice out in space, on an otherwise solid rock. I'm not understanding first how and when this water actually made it to this location. I see a serious problem here. Ice in space, even at very low temperatures, tends to turn to vapor and disappear. It may happen at very low rates when you are in the shade on the moon, but it will turn to vapor. If you stipulate that the moon is a few billion years old and the surface is largely unchanged for the last few million years, any surface ice would surely have vaporized by now.
For this reason, I'm a bit surprised to hear they think this is water. I suppose it is *possible* that some comet dropped off some of it's water in the recent past, but the moon presents a pretty small cross section to capture chunks of comments, and usually such impacts are fairly high energy affairs so even a large chunk of ice is going to leave very little.
I suppose they will have to come up with some theory to explain this, because we *all* know how old things need to be... Forget the guys that are saying 6 thousand years.... We got to have billions or this doesn't work.
Or did you mean that national governments should handle it?
I was leaving the choice of who or what managed the local DNS registry up to the local government of the country. Of course the country would be free to manage their domains however they wish, do it themselves or have a private company do it.
Also, for the rest of your critique, I fully realize that #1 would break a lot of stuff, but the question was "How would have you done it differently?" not "What would you change now?" We are truly stuck with the legacy and URL's are not going to change anytime soon.
1. Change the URL spec to something like "Protocol:(port)//Top.domain.subdomain....) so "http://shashdot.org" would be "http://org.slashdot" or if you used a nonstandard port it would be "http:8080//org.slashdot" and if you owned org.slashdot you would be free to make as many sub domains as would fit in a URL.
2. Make URL's Unicode strings so they are usable across as many languages as possible.
3. Fix the DNS protocol to include some way to validate that the information you get actually comes from the registered owner of the domain in question. Also provide a means to flush the domain table cache before the TTL expires, by making servers that cache register with the source.
4. Assign standard TLD's (say for each country) to local authorities. Additional top level domains (say "slashdot") are allowed as well, but in order to be available as a domain the local authority must allow it (and can possibly require local payment for local access.)
There really are some necessary regulations that need to be enforced. First, they need to make sure they prevent junking up low earth orbits by making sure there are a minimum number of bits coming off anything that might end up in orbit, something NASA has the most experience with. Second, they need to make sure launch and recovery operations are properly coordinated with air traffic, which is of concern to the FAA.
I'm sure there are a whole pile of issues that would be best to get into the FAA's regulations before private space flight becomes commonplace. The above are just a few.
I wonder how long until we would have a Linux distribution for this little gem. I'll bet that Linux runs faster....
Imagine a government with access to a complex OS source code.
Hmmmm.... I close my eyes and imagine that.... Um.. Not much help to me without the necessary tools to build said source into something and perhaps some documentation that explains how stuff is supposed to work... Oh, Well I suppose you could eventually figure out what tools you needed though trial and error, then developed your own documentation on the internal workings of Microsoft's code.. But make no mistake, it's NOT going to be an easy task to work through enough of this to even attempt to use the knowledge for anything useful.
Besides, it would be MUCH easier and cheaper to co-opt some hardware vendor's driver set and slip your stuff into that than risk doing the same at Microsoft.. Not that I'm saying it didn't happen, only that it seems easier other ways.....
But that is how conspiracies work. The more information you don't have the stronger the evidence that it must be real. I mean a while back they took a mixed race baby born in a different country, paid the hospital to lie to publish a new paper reports, and an other insider generated false documents to prove he was born in the United States, Pay for a team of actors to say they knew this child when they were children, all in the offshoot that perhaps this child (where the culture at the time figured had near 0 chance of major success in life) would become president and support the Socialist Cause....
Yea, and the moon landings where faked too.... Seriously, there are just some things that do not make sense to keep beating and this whole birther thing is a long dead horse, as is the idea that the moon landings were faked or 9/11 was an inside job. Besides, there are more effective arguments you can use to use that don't involve wild conspiracies where you have to suspend all reason.
It's usually better to not think of things as conspiracies anyway. Folks are usually not that good at cooking up such complicated hoaxes and are even worse at pulling them off. This is especially true of hoaxes that would require the cooperation of large numbers of folks over long periods of time.
First and foremost is that there has to be TWO conductors unless we are dealing with static voltages. You can use one wire and the ground as the second conductor, but there is going to be significant resistance in any kind of useable length. This means that there are at least two places for someone to be making measurements to figure out the necessary information.
Second, this method has a limited number of logical states (LL, LH, HL, HH) that encode two bits of data which will be clearly observable on the wire. Of the four states you will see three unique wire states (Low, med, high) with only one not disclosing the state of both ends. Once you established these states by observing the wire, you can easily determine two of the four states. Thus by simple voltage measurements you have already decoded half of the information you need. What's left is to simply observe the direction of the current and that will tell you what end of the wire has low or high resistance.
I don't think thermal noise really matters here because for this to be a practical system you will have to pick voltage sources that have enough signal to noise so you can detect them at the both ends of the wire. They may look like random noise, and even be random noise, but in order for there to be a delectable result at either end of the wire means there is a measurable value. Further, in order to detect highs and lows, each end of the system will have to KNOW what voltage is being applied, or how could they know the voltage/current to look for?
I suppose you could improve your security by increasing the number of resisters, but if this worked for two, it is sure to work for more than two values, just with more emphasis on the current measurements being required.
This all sounds great, but it is not really what happens. I've seen some pretty interesting issues raised by folks who are definitely creationists which are summarily dismissed as hogwash because their different world view. Further, the reasoned objections raised by creationists are often not even acknowledged as being anything more than religious based tripe of the lowest order. Canned responses like "Creationism is not based in fact" are often thrown out unfairly.
As I see it, the issue really boils down to your basic world view. If you equate "scientific method" with no creator (i.e. The theory of a creator cannot be proven so therefore must be invalid) then you simply *have* to be dismissive of creationists, because your world view demands it. You get statements like "Creationism is not fact based" because of the basic world view of the speaker, not because the Creationists argument isn't scientific or based on accepted scientific laws and observable facts.
Problem here is that science would have to admit that proving or disproving the existence of a creator is out of its ability, yet in many cases they are driven to assume that a creator does not exist because "it's not scientific to believe that God exists". So, if a creator exists (an open question by most accounts) and science doesn't allow for that possibility there is a good chance that science is wrong in this case.
I consider it a logical folly to simply dismiss the scientific views of others who really just differ in world view. I get it, that if you want to assume there is no creator, Evolution is pretty much the only game in town, but if you allow for a creator to exist in your world view, many more possible ways to explain things arise. Now if you don't want to accept the premise that a creator exists, or at least leave that question open in your world view, how's the results of that different than a religious zealot who refuses to accept that the earth is NOT in the center of the universe? God doesn't exist, so evolution must be true.... Pretty sad
When I lost a job to a layoff a few years ago, I left them with a list of accounts and passwords that they needed to change to make sure I had no access to their systems anymore. I had firewall passwords, root passwords on a number of business critical and other accesses that could have been used to shut them down. I assumed that they actually had disabled or changed all my accounts, at least until about 18 months later when I got a phone call...
"Hey, do you have that admin password for the firewall still?"
"You are kidding me right? I left all this information with you when I left 18 months ago and you are only *now* getting around to this? I don't have this information anymore because I left it with YOU." (Even if I did there was no way I would tell them...) "But I can help you recover the password if you want to hire me. Let's see, $100/hour plus expenses, minimum 5 hours paid in advance...." They never called again after that.
Seriously it is really bad to even think you can just walk of with proprietary information or do damage to some business because they let you go. I would consider it STUPID to even consider doing something like that. It's very likely that they will be able to figure out what happened and who was responsible, then turn you in to the police or just sue you directly. Either way is bad enough...
It's still up for discussion why it's happening.
We are directly responsible for this planet entering a new geological age with as much speed and force as the Cretaceousâ"Paleogene extinction event.
I'm struck with the contradiction in what you posted. Why is still an open question yet you assume "We are directly responsible?"
For the sake of argument, I'll stipulate that Global warming is happening. However, we do NOT know, for sure, that man is the cause of it, or that we can do anything about it. It may be time to start planning for a warmer earth, but unless we KNOW that specific human activity is actually causing the issue we need to carefully consider all the impacts on what we do. Incomplete understanding of this will only lead to bad policy, and bad policy will only lead to more pain and suffering.
For example. There is a push to "reduce fossil fuel use" and use renewables here in the USA. The EPA has started mandating the use of Ethanol as motor fuel because it is a renewable resource. Sounds great right? Not so fast... Two things are now happening... First, grain and corn that was once used for food is now being used to make Ethanol instead. Prices for Corn have increased as demand rises and we turn food into fuel. Problem is, this makes it harder for poorer folks who depend on cheap corn to live and drives up the cost of eggs, chicken, pork, beef and all things based on Corn (and other grains) as feed. Further, it tends to raise the production of corn crops, at the expense of other food crops so almost ALL foods now get more expensive. What did we do to the poor when we started mandating we turn food into fuel? We actually made them more hungry... Not a good thing. Also, Ethanol is STILL more expensive than the standard fuel, so because it is mandated fuel prices went up too. Just what we needed, higher food and fuel prices....
What we really cannot afford is BAD policy which is based on half of the truth or misunderstanding what is really going on. I agree that the stakes are high in this debate but we MUST be correct or we will do more damage than if we just left it alone. At this point we simply do not understand why this is happening, nor can one say with assurance that human activity has caused it so it is not wise to start making sweeping policy changes in an attempt to deal with the problem.
Finally. This is the only way that the RIAA/MPAA will change its ways: when other massive corporations start to fight back in court. Triple bonus to Comcast for calling this what it is: a shakedown organized through the legal system. I normally hate Comcast with a passion, but I will cheer them on in this fight. Bring out the popcorn!
Make no mistake, their motive is profit and nothing more. Now that there is legal grounds that allows you to say "no" every ISP will be doing the same thing because it will eventually make this whole legal shakedown route impassable. Fairly quickly the shakedown artists will either figure out this doesn't work anymore and stop, or they will go broke trying. Once the message gets out that it doesn't pay, folks will stop doing it and the ISP's won't have to deal with it anymore and they can stop paying lawyers and admins to handle such requests.
It's all about profit....
First, and foremost Comcast is in business to make a profit. Make no mistake, if they thought they could profit from turning folks in, they would. Read some of the supporting documents. Verizon (a Comcast competitor) has taken a stand and started saying "Nope" to the courts/. Apparently they have enough legal ground to quash the "track this IP for us" requests. This is a two fold benefit to any ISP. First, you don't have to waste time and money having your staff searching though logs to find out who had that IP at that time. Second, you keep a small segment of your customers who care about such things from running to your competition.
Surely this problem will go away for all ISP's in fairly short order. Once an ISP starts successfully protesting such requests for information, the guys doing the shakedowns will eventually stop wasting time/money making the requests. ISP's will have to pay their lawyers a bit more up front to stop such requests, but eventually this will get them OUT of the business of turning in their subscribers by keeping them out of court. With the profits fading away, the shakedown artists will have abandon the courts and try to come up with some other way to do their shakedowns.
This is NOT over. Verizon, Comcast and others have signed on to start giving their customers warnings on behalf of various copyright holders for various types of infringing content passing over their networks. It's called something like "six strikes" and the providers are hoping it will allow them to generate more business for their "legal" services, by working in cooperation with MPAA and others. I hold now illusions that this "solution" is a good thing for anybody, except perhaps for the ISP's who see it as a marketing opportunity. I wonder if my bittorrent activity (all legal by the way) will draw a warning from Verizon (my ISP). I know they don't like bittorrent and it sure seems that they throttle my connection when I have active transfers, so I'm half expecting to be "warned" about the Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS distributions I try to seed over my 25Mbit connection.
They are in this for the profit. If they got a percentage of the shakedown take, you'd bet they be out there actively turning folks in before they got asked. They are simply making a business decision that it will cost less and maximize profits to take this route, and given that there seems to be legal justification now for saying "Nope!" that the court is accepting you can bet this will continue. If alternate legal tactics alter the economics for the ISP's, you can bet they will be turning folks in once more. If it proves profitable to start the "warning" process with their customers, even before a copyright holder complains, you can be the will do that too.
Oh yea.... Once I lived near a guy who had nearly the same name and he had some credit issues and bill collections. Apparently, our credit records got linked and it took ages to get the mess cleaned up....
You missed my point... Most of the data loss and service disruptions I've experienced or had to recover from were caused by human error, not hardware failures. Being on the cloud doesn't make this kind of problem go away, but it does make it a bit harder to recover because you have to call somebody...
Domestic monitoring *requires* a warrant so a judge must be shown probable cause or any evidence collected would not be allowed in court. So, in the case you are bringing up, if they monitor a domestic to domestic phone call without a warrant they cannot use any evidence collected to prosecute. Given this, they would be *stupid* to not get the warrants, because they'd walk Scott free otherwise.
Congress holds the money and can choose to not fund the CIA anytime it decides to. Just remember that the CIA is a part of the *executive* branch, subject to the funding appropriation process, the Laws passed by congress and upheld by the courts. There are checks and balances here and the CIA amounts to but a small player on this stage. So I encourage the senators to do what they can to make the point if they don't get what they want from the CIA.